Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Egan_BW]

I make all of the directors and writers and shit play a star wars pen and paper roleplay once a week for a whole year, then have them write a trilogy based on that.

[ChairmanPoo]

The first order is another good example of the complete void of creativity that Star Wars is.  The empire is defeated and the republic is restored.  A new imperial remnant is trying to restore the old order.  They have an interstellar superweapon and giant spaceships and the people fighting them are the "resistance."  Why?  Why is the republic still "resisting?"  They're the status quo now!  This should've been a reversal of the old formula, where the first order is small and weak, maybe one of many imperial remnant organizations that the republic is slowly taking out with their superior forces, and maybe they pull some clever coup (clever meaning not an insterstellar superweapon to just automatically win) to put the republic on the defensive.

Now that you mention it: the EU started like that, before it got silly (which
.. kind of happened right after those three books, IMO). The Thrawn trilogy was exactly like that. And it was actually good. I liked EU Thrawn precisedly because of that: he was a reflection of the Rebel Alliance, a sort of Hannibal if you like.  Disneywars Thrawn lacks that feature, unfortunately.

[Max™]

...wait, if there are prequels, and sequels, does that make the middle bits just quels?

*head explodes like it got hit by a hyperjumping ship*

[Zanzetkuken The Great]

Did hear two interesting takes as to how the trilogy could have been a fair bit better from the start in discussion of Rise of Skywalker on another site.

1) Poe should not have been disappeared on Jakku, and instead have piloted the Falcon off Jakku. What Rey could have done during that scene would be something like fixing various mechanical problems that just kept cropping up, and you could instantly get a team dynamic from the group by having the TIE that Poe and Finn escaped on having gone down due to a mechanical problem neither knew how to fix.  As a bonus, you get the whole crew together pretty early in the first movie rather than having to wait until the near-credits of the second for two of them to even meet.

2) Based on how the introduction scenes went, Rey seems more fitting to be the successor of Han Solo, and Finn would have been the more fitting successor to Luke, especially with a tiny tweak of the mission at the start of the movie having been the most recent of many rather than his first.  Seems like leagues more fertile ground for motivation by having Finn as the Jedi to stand against the First Order after all the horrors he witnessed and after growing out of his fear, and having Rey grow from someone wanting to stay on a rough planet waiting and in relative safety into an gambling explorer who's familiar with the shadier side of the law.

[Kot]

Finn as the Jedi to stand against the First Order after all the horrors he witnessed and after growing out of his fear, and having Rey grow from someone wanting to stay on a rough planet waiting and in relative safety into an gambling explorer who's familiar with the shadier side of the law.

Both were impossible because Force is female, duh.

[Jopax]

Y'know, I'm kinda enjoying the Mandalorian, but my biggest issue with it is how much the Star Wars of it detracts from the show. The show is trying to be a gritty and serious affair, and it kinda works until it tries to pair that with the made for kids silliness/stupidity.

Like, the third episode, him infiltrating the compound crawling with storm troopers is supposed to be this tense series of scenes, but then as usual, all the storm troopers are a goofy and ineffectual joke and it takes all the goddamn wind out of the scene. Tho I guess that's kind of to be expected when you try and make a grim and gritty take on something essentially made for kids.

[Reelya]

2) Based on how the introduction scenes went, Rey seems more fitting to be the successor of Han Solo

The real problem with Rey is that she's Han, Luke and Leia rolled into one, with all their good points and none of their bad points. The sole problem she has is the "what is this darkness inside me?" thing, which is a common Mary Sue trope, too.

They were so keen to make sure "she don't need no man" that when she got captured, she escaped before the team could rescue her. So she can do anything, doesn't need anyone. Great basis for an ensemble movie. I'm just surprised she can't also speak 6 million dialects and has a built-in hacking probe, so she can one-up the droids in every scene they're in.

[Cthulhu]

The dark side temptation isn't a mary sue thing, though.  It's a star wars is creatively bankrupt thing.  It's just rehashing the luke arc.  Same thing with the stormtroopers being useless.  It's a meme from the OT that they just bring back even though it isn't appropriate because star wars is mostly incapable of doing anything new or creative.

[hector13]

The problem with the stormtroopers being shit thing is I think it wasn’t meant to be that they were shit, it was that there was the hint they were being deliberately shit in Episode IV, so they could figure out where the Rebel base was, but they forgot about it in every other episode.

[Reelya]

That depends on what their orders are. For example, in Episode VI the troopers capture the rebel leaders and order them to put their hands up. So maybe they wanted them alive if possible. Sure, if they were trying to capture them then more stormtroopers would die than necessary, but that's not the kind of thing that the Empire gives a shit about.

Also, remember the Battle of Hoth was the main stormtrooper engagement in the second film. The heroes had to run away. The problem here is that the movies aren't quite as wall-to-wall shootouts with stormtroopers as we're making out. There are probably more minutes of that in the Death Star scene in A New Hope than all stormtrooper battles in the other two OT movies together.

EDIT: however a huge plot hole in Empire is why Darth Vader only disabled the hyper-drive on the Millennium Falcon at Bespin rather than just stealing it. But he did have a tractor beam ready, so he apparently planned for them to pilot it straight up to him. So the theory that he wanted them alive could go for all three movies actually.

[Iduno]

I don't like Palpatine having a lightsaber.  He didn't have one in the OT and he obviously thinks little of them, he calls it a "jedi weapon."  Darth Vader has a lightsaber cause he's a fallen jedi, but then they made every sith just an evil jedi with a red lightsaber.

Right, like they're just going to know about previous movies before writing a new one.

All of these plotholes could have been avoided if they put in the slightest amount of effort or hired one of their insane fans to check canon. But Disney brought in Abrams because they don't care about canon. They came out and said that when they bought the properties.

[Urist McScoopbeard]

So I finally saw it. Uh, not as bad as I thought honestly. And for all the fan service and terrible writing there's actually some quality stuff in there.

Having seen all three movies now, I'm confident enough to say there WAS a really good trilogy in there, but it got absolutely fucked by Disney's oppressive creative guidance. That and Rian Johnson's very real incompetence. Honestly, you could make a solid SW movie just by recutting different sequences from TFA and TRS.

There are too many fine details for me to nitpick in The Rise of Skywalker rn tho.

Dewit.

[Madman198237]

Watched TRS yesterday. I plan on watching it again at some point, but right now the best I can say for it is that it could have been much, much worse.

Now, for a lengthy probably hyperspace-focused rant about this movie and probably also a couple others and what they've done to established facts about Star Wars.

Spoiler: A rant. No really, it's just a rant. I'm warning you, it's a long list of complaints with no mention of any good parts whatsoever. In short, its a rant. (click to show/hide)

It's like they didn't even care for the rules or reason of anything previously established---what the heck is "hyperspace skipping" and why does it matter, it's never mentioned again in the movie (so it's not even a heavy-handed setup for later, like I originally expected). Hyperspace jumps now happen between places instantaneously or nearly so (confusing the heck out of the idea that hyperspace travel takes time as presented in, say, literally the first-ever Star Wars movie), can happen in atmosphere and in a gravity well (yeah, Rogue One did that as well, but still, really?) Why bother using regular engines if you can hyperspace yourself everywhere, from any point, at any time? Why, precisely, can First Order TIE fighters

The "Holdo Maneuver was a 1-in-a-hundred-million shot" thing is a patently ridiculous attempt to cover up the problems presented by using hyperspace as a weapon, since if you just go grab a thousand asteroids, put a thousand hyperdrives on them, you could then jump back and forth across the system until one of the things explodes and the entire fleet is just instantly killed. Even if you've got to make a hundred thousand jumps, since hyperspace jumps now take only a couple seconds you could definitely jump back and forth enough to kill that fleet within the time limit of 18 hours or whatever, even if the enemy detected you in the process they'd evidently take too long to actually deploy to matter, especially if you dropped at asteroid at high speed out of hyperspace pointed directly at the beacon tower things (why can you not just check the direction of gravity to figure out how to launch this fleet?) and just let Sir Isaac Newton finish *that* job for you.

They should've had it be a bunch of droid-crewed/slaved-together ships like the Katana Fleet in the old canon because that would've been cooler and more reasonable and given a sort-of-possibly-maybe-not-really decent explanation for why they need some sort of activation signal or whatever, to suit Palpatine's desire for ultimate control over everything (and his probable pathological hatred of any and all possibility of rebellion, given what the last Rebellion did to him ).

[McTraveller]

As a movie by itself, I think Rise of Sykwalker was middling to fair.  Not awful, but not epic.

For the movie itself, some minor quibbles really - like why do you have to crash your ship that clearly has hovering capability (ref. landing in Cloud City) just because the landing gear is out?

I did see a distinct lack of JJ Lens Flair^TM - someone must've given him a stern talking to.

Overall though - there just wasn't enough weight to things - the victory didn't feel like it cost enough:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

It would have felt better if nobody left the throne chamber.  Or even if Ben was the one that left, not Rey.

Even the supposed struggle with "are we all alone" was not heavy enough - it was inevitable that everyone would rally together.

I think I also echo the previous comments that it felt like they were trying to manage too many character arcs, so there wasn't enough time to really get invested in any single character.  The OT was basically focused on Luke, with a couple other side stories like the Han & Leia romance.  Prequels were split a bit too, but not as heavy - just between Anakin and Obi Wan (maybe Padme counts).  But the new ones we had Rey, Poe, Finn, Kylo, too much backstory with Luke and Leia, too many weird side stories and new short-lived characters (Phasma, Poe's ex, Maz, the new general, even the Knights of Ren felt like they were just thrown in there).  It felt like they were trying to tell a story that is too big to fit in three films to be honest - which really does reek of Disney trying to set up "here's the Poe & his ex spinoff series" kind of stuff.

However, at the end of the day, it was entertaining enough, and I don't mind having watched it.

[scriver]

I finally saw it yesterday. It was not as bad as I had anticipated. If we look past all the incredibly farfetched and/or just plain dumb plot stuff it was probably the best movie of the new trilogy, in that it's the only movie of the three that felt like a movie at the end. Last Jedi/Ep.8 still was more visually appealing, though.

So I agree with a lot that's already been said in this thread. I had been spoilered by the rumours of Palpatine returning so yeah, I was expecting that. It's still awful, but I was expecting it to be worse.

Still suffers extremely bad from JJ Abrams syndrome with the "modular scenes" as you call it. First half was very bad with it. At least I can't say I was bored. I guess that's the only upside of  the practice. But it has absolutely no impact.

Abrams also seems to have learned a lot of lessons from the fab outrage against TLJ (and I insist, by the way, that it was Abrams that was the main culprit behind a lot of what went wrong with it -- sure, I too was upset by Rian's demeaning attitude (I have a good rant or two in this thread about it) but I do feel that the movie was being anchored a lot by Abrams and what comes off as an insipid compulsion of his to not have a plot or a running thread and need to remake the OT nearly scene by scene), so yeah a lot of lessons learned. Unfortunately, the majority of them seem to have been the wrong lessons. I think there was a lot of dumb in the TLJ. What we got now what a lot of overcompensation for the criticism against it. And I really don't think this is what people wanted when they got angry at TLJ. I think what people want is something new that builds on the old as opposed to tearing at it, not just mindless nostalgia. I feel that a lot of TLJ was a result from not understanding the reception of Episode7 (ie fans love to hypothesize and fantasize about the story because they love hypothesizing and fantasizing in itself and they build upon what was left open by the movies because that is what hey have to go by: fans got hung up on Rey's parentage because it was an open plot hook, not because of a need to have her be the child of a known character) and now we have a third movie build largely around a complete misunderstanding about the reception of Episode 8. Overall, so many good plot points thrown out and wasted over all three movies.

And yeah, the characters. They still don't matter, do they? Captain guy still meanders around and is completely pointless (I hate that stupid beautiful face of his and is not in the least jealous of his jawline). Finn gets no character development this time either and his past as a storm trooper still dangles like a giant potential storyline behind him but nope no emotional content there. At least they acknowledged it this time with that group of other deserters. I did like the line about how somebody who's not force-sensitive might experience the force, though. But I don't like the way they talk about the Force as having a will and a purpose and like it has an active will and an agenda. But I guess that's just a philosophical/metaphysical difference of opinion between me and pretty much everyone who has ever had any say on a Star Wars production it seems.

Kylo and Rei, despite the heavy plot focus, also feels like they get very little emotional focus. Kylo gets his redemptional revaluation with his father, at least, but it feels cheap. However, despite not feeling for them during much of the movie, I did feel like they mattered to me at the end, so the movie did sneak that up on me. I liked the force bond stuff. I think it's the only plot point from Episode 8 that they actually kept and did something with. The force transporting thing they had going was also neat, probably the only Chekhov's Gun the movie ever bothers firing after establishing it. And it makes use of it several times! It's almost like Abrams deep down knows how yo structure a fictional work after all.

Something that ties in with this that I liked was that the Ren-Knights didn't have lightsabers. Which makes sense, seeming as not even Kylo managed to build a functioning one. I don't know if it's a conscious design but I liked it nonetheless.

So yeah. I've got a lot to say about this and I don't think I will be able to structure my rant properly, so let's just end on that positive note.